Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Claire's baby cake

Claire, our wonderful and efficient payroll officer, left us on maternity leave yesterday. She is going to have a little girl, so I decided I was going to make her a girly-pink baby-themed cake for her last day. The pink base cake was made from the cupcake recipe used by Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella in her breath-takingly beautiful Ispahan cupcakes. The cake formed a macaron-style crust on top as it baked, which I loved.My inspiration for the cake design came from Cuppycake Digital Designs, who makes the sweetest little baby cupcakes ever. However, not having the patience to make 24 of the little sods, I converted the design to a single large cake. As no-one wants to eat a massive ball of rolled fondant, which I would have needed to make for a pure fondant head and body big enough for this cake, I instead used part of the cake batter to make two patty-cake sized small cakes that I iced together for the head, and a half-size mini loaf cake for the baby's body. I iced the cake and the body parts with water icing, and stuck the head and body in place while the icing on the cake was still wet. I created the blanket, dummy and bow from rolled fondant, with the blanket binding picked out with a fork and the blanket design embossed using a small butterfly cookie cutter, and stuck those on the cake while the water icing was almost but not quite dry. The baby's eyes and nose were painted on using black liquid food colouring on the tip of a skewer. I was also a little crafty for Claire, and created this cross-stitch photo-album wrapper from a pattern in Issue 198 of CrossStitcher:

I bought the materials before I knew whether Claire was having a boy or a girl, hence I played it safe and made it green. I even hauled out the sewing machine from hibernation to sew on the ribbon!

I wish Claire and her family every happiness for the pending birth of Claire's second child.